The Draft Resolution of the Left Wing at Zimmerwald

Written:Written prior to August 20 (September 2) 1915Published:First published in 1930 inLenin Miscellany XIV.

      Published according to the manuscript.Source:Lenin
	  Collected Works,

      Progress Publishers,[197[4]],

      Moscow,Volume 21,

      pages345-348.Translated:Transcription\Markup:D. WaltersandR. CymbalaPublic Domain:Lenin Internet Archive

      2003

      (2005).You may freely copy, distribute,
	display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and
	commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet
	Archive” as your source.

Thepresent war has been engendered by
    imperialism. Capitalism has already achieved that highest
    stage. Society’s productive forces and the magnitudes of capital have
    outgrown the narrow limits of the individual national states. Hence the
    striving on the part of the Great Powers to enslave other nations and to
    seize colonies as sources of raw material and spheres of investment of
    capital. The whole world is merging into a single economic organism; it has
    been carved up among a handful of Great Powers. The objective conditions for
    socialism have fully matured, and the present war is a war of the
    capitalists for privileges and monopolies that might delay the downfall of
    capitalism.

Thesocialists, who seek to liberate labour from the yoke of capital and
    who defend the world-wide solidarity of the workers, are struggling against
    any kind of oppression and inequality of nations. When the bourgeoisie was a
    progressive class, and the overthrow of feudalism, absolutism and oppression
    by other nations stood on the historical order of the day, the socialists,
    as invariably the most consistent and most resolute of democrats, recognised
    “defence of the fatherland” in the meaning implied by those aims,
    and in that meaning alone. Today too, should a war of the oppressed nations
    against the oppressor Great Powers break out in the east of Europe or in the
    colonies, the socialists’ sympathy would be wholly with the
    oppressed.

Thewar of today, however, has been engendered by an entirely different
    historical period, in which the bourgeoisie, from a progressive class, has
    turned reactionary. Withboth groups of belligerents, this war is a war of
    slaveholders, and is designed to preserve and extend slavery; it is a war
    for the repartitioning of colonies, for the “right” to oppress
    other nations, for privileges and monopolies for Great-Power capital, and
    for the perpetuation of wage slavery by splitting up the workers of the
    different countries and crushing them through reaction. That is why, on the
    part of both warring groups, all talk about “defence of the
    fatherland” is deception of the people by the bourgeoisie. Neither the
    victory of any one group nor a return to thestatus quocan do
    anything either to protect the freedom of most countries in the world from
    imperialist oppression by a handful of Great Powers, or to ensure that the
    working class keep even its present modest cultural gains. The period of a
    relatively peaceful capitalism has passed, never to return. Imperialism has
    brought the working class unparalleled intensification of the class
    struggle, want, and unemployment, a higher cost of living, and the
    strengthening of oppression by the trusts, of militarism, and the political
    reactionaries, who are raising their heads in all countries, even the
    freest.

Inreality, the “defence of the fatherland” slogan in the
    present war is tantamount to a defence of the “right” of
    one’s “own” national bourgeoisie to oppress other nations;
    it is in fact a national liberal-labour policy, an alliance between a
    negligible section of the workers and their “own” national
    bourgeoisie, against the mass of the proletarians and the
    exploited. Socialists who pursue such a policy are in fact chauvinists,
    social-chauvinists. The policy of voting for war credits, of joining
    governments, ofBurgfrieden,[1]and the like, is a betrayal of
    socialism. Nurtured by the conditions of the “peaceful”, period
    which has now come to an end, opportunism has now matured to a degree that
    calls for a break with socialism; it has become an open enemy to the
    proletariat’s movement for liberation. The working class cannot
    achieve its historic aims without waging a most resolute struggle against
    both forthright opportunism and social-chauvinism (the majorities in the
    Social-Democraticparties of France, Germany and Austria; Hyndman, the
    Fabians and the trade unionists in Britain; Rubanovich, Plekhanov andNasha Zaryain Russia, etc.) and the so-called Centre, which has
    surrendered the Marxist stand to the chauvinists.

Unanimouslyadopted by socialists of the entire world in anticipation of
    that very kind of war among the Great Powers which has now broken out, the
    Basle Manifesto of 1912 distinctly recognised the imperialist and
    reactionary nature of that war, declared it criminal for workers of one
    country to shoot at workers of another country, and proclaimed the approach
    of theproletarian revolutionin connection with that very
    war. Indeed, the war is creating a revolutionary situation, is engendering
    revolutionary sentiments and unrest in the masses, is arousing in the finer
    part of the proletariat a realisation of the perniciousness of opportunism,
    and is intensifying the struggle against it. The masses’ growing
    desire for peace expresses their disappointment, the defeat of the bourgeois
    lie regarding the defence of the fatherland, and the awakening of their
    revolutionary consciousness. In utilising that temper for their
    revolutionary agitation, and not shying away in that agitation from
    considerations of the defeat of their “own” country, the
    socialists will not deceive the people with the hope that, without the
    revolutionary overthrow of the present-day governments, a possibility exists
    of a speedy democratic peace, which will be durable in some degree and will
    preclude any oppression of nations, a possibility of disarmament, etc. Only
    the social revolution of the proletariat opens the way towards peace and
    freedom for the nations.

Theimperialist war is ushering in the era of the social revolution. All
    the objective conditions of recent times have put the proletariat’s
    revolutionary mass struggle on the order of the day. It is the duty of
    socialists, while making use of every means of the working class’s
    legal struggle, to subordinate each and every of those means to this
    immediate and most important task, develop the workers’ revolutionary
    consciousness, rally them in the international revolutionary struggle,
    promote and encourage any revolutionary action, and do everything possible
    toturn the imperialist war between the peoples into a civil war of the
    oppressed classes against their oppressors, a war for the expropriation of
    the class of capitalists, for the conquest of political power by the
    proletariat, and the realisation of socialism.

[1]Aclass
    truce.—Ed.